Jackie Danicki

This week, I was informed by someone I highly respect and admire - someone I did not know was even reading my blatherings here - that my writing about addiction had struck a chord and led to some degree of change in that person’s life. I was, as they say in Britain, gobsmacked.

It sounds extremely cheesy, but I heard this at exactly the right time, from exactly the right sort of person. Funny how life goes that way sometimes. (I cannot thank this person enough, I hasten to add, for having the courage to open up to me in the way that he did, face-to-face.)

I never feel more vulnerable than when I am holding my own flaws, defects, and weaknesses up for scrutiny in this space. How much more public can you get? The truth is that, while helping others by doing so is a real privilege and extremely moving for me, I don’t do it for other people. I do it for me.

Sometimes I wonder how much it is really doing for me, apart from reminding me that I need to sit with my feelings and not avoid them through various vices. During my last two trips to London, though, I have had so many people take me aside and comment on the difference they see in me that I am starting to allow myself to believe that there just might be something to this. (Yes, still battling cynicism.)

I am just shy of five months into my new life. Time has flown, but the impatient perfectionist in me wants to be rid of all these tendencies and flaws already. I have to be reminded, every day, that this is a process. I yearn to make new mistakes, not the same old ones, and was relieved to be told earlier this week, by an expert who has seen hundreds of people into sober lives, that the nature of addiction recovery is to make the same mistakes over and over. It is an opportunity for more learning. Which is interesting, since being teachable is something I keep hearing is good for fighting off cynicism. Fancy that.

Filed under: Life